“Your page takes too long to load,” said one subscriber after another.
“Yeah, I know… but I’m putting up a bunch of content,” I replied.
As a publisher, and a journalist, I hate writing a story about my company, especially in essay or narrative form — first person and passive voice too! But my readers deserve to know why the last three weeks have seen my news-gathering grind to a near halt.
Page Speed. Looking at the information my site gathers on visitors I could tell that new people were coming to the site, but not waiting around for 6 seconds to see the page load. They were moving on. And I don’t blame them.
I was outraged that the publishing engine I had gone with after months of research had such fatal flaws. I contacted customer supports at Hostgator, WordPress, Elegant Themes and they all blamed each other. I dug through their proffered “how to improve your page load speed” links, and community forums to research tools that could fix this problem. I dumped a couple hundred dollars into what appeared to be the best, all designed to address specific problems pointed out by diagnostic tools like GTMetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights. Then scores of hours into their documentation and YouTube video’s to figure out how to use them. When I took the recommended actions with these tools, the problem only got worse. I found Page Speed experts on UpWork and looked for the best among them, but found all of them lacked attention to detail. (I said at the end of my job description that one of my qualifying questions required the answer Sphygmomanometer — even though it wouldn’t make any sense — so I could see who actually read job descriptions. Answer: No one.)
Starting week three I dug in to yet another tool and more documentation and move videos — and started to make headway. Also, after spending 15 hours in an online help desk communication thread with the theme maker I finally got someone to give me a straight answer to an image size question I had that wasn’t addressed in any of their documentation. I will have to buy and learn to use Adobe Illustrator to implement a fix for this problem, but with the technical answer it is something I can do. Besides. I’ve been learning all kinds of new skills. I’m a Page Speed expert now.
I got the LCP – or Largest Content Paint (what you see when it looks like a page) down to 1.4 seconds, with a fully loaded page at 3.4 seconds. When I implement my new photo sizing policies, after learning Illustrator, I’ll improve that even more.
This problem had a stranglehold on my customer acquisition. New prospects were coming to the site, then quickly leaving. My weekly subscriber numbers dropped into single digits, and threatened to disappear altogether. My existing readers were emailing me to complain… and this had to be fixed.
I’ve had the honor of talking with hundreds of entrepreneurs who have described events they had to deal with that could have derailed their business, and few of them claimed to have had the skills or money to fix what was killing them — but they found a way. I doubt this will be the only such obstacle I’ll have to surmount, but I love being part of a community that shares my optimism and drive as we do what we must to move our business forward and engage the world.
